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Starting Fresh with a New PPC Account

I've inherited an Adwords account with a few years' worth of history. The account has changed hands a lot though and there's a lot of clutter and confusing account architecture (confusing and redundant campaigns, thousands of inactive long-long-tail keywords for every match type, etc.).

I have a new architecture/strategy in mind but I'm unsure if I should start a new account from scratch, pause 90% of things and start some new campaigns, or delete a bunch of stuff permanently and start some new campaigns.

My fear with the pausing option is that I'll have to wade through a bunch of clutter in my daily management and reporting - I like to keep things clean. My fear with deleting is losing data - I'd like to be able to always look back at how things were. And my fear with the new account from scratch method is losing whatever account/campaign quality score or historical value the account has built over time and the logistics of having to stop the old account to create a new account. Can you even have 2 accounts with the same domain or would I have to delete the old account before launching the new?

For all my past PPC accounts, I started them more or less from scratch so this is new to me. Any advice/insights would be most appreciated.

So you're saying you would pause things and start some new campaigns leaving all the clutter and inactive elements? My strategy calls for several new campaigns for budgetary and geo-targeting control and several targeted ad groups within - so it's a pretty hefty architecture I need to implement.

What's the downside of starting a new account and just leaving the old one in-tact for historical reference?

Yes pause existing. and just review the history & analyze keywords etc.

The idea is not to have the same keyword running at the same time. I think that would affect your keyword performance.

I did not have any downside for creating new campaign. Remember That your Landing Page is important so if you just work on adwords only and leave the website as before, there is a chance that you won't feel huge of improvement.

Hi Jeff. I agree with ennovation, create a clean slate for yourself but keep access to that account for the history, hopefully it had conversions/goals setup.

Be sure to delete all old payment details from old Adwords accounts, I had one account get hacked last month and luckily I saw an email come through with "Google is debiting your banking account". It was an account two years old and Google didn't make it easy getting a refund even though it was clearly hacked.

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